toyot posted:

i like beat-em-ups

pandering, sub-gritty shit. call me when there's a morrowind of the left

damoj posted:

i wonder how effective modern video games have been at cementing general anti-communist/anti-soviet canards

i wonder about this too, video games are obviously full of propaganda through direct involvement of the U.S. military in the industry but idk how effective it is compared to something like a TV show, like Homeland or Jack Ryan or etc.

one part that makes me wonder about it is how video game players have a tendency to fetishize the bad guys in their favorite games & want to buy expansions that allow them to play as the bad guys and learn all about their sympathetic motivations and so on, because when they see a toy they can't play with inside the game they get frustrated. and like we've discussed before, there's an apparent limit to the sophistication of video game writing nowadays, so it's harder to introduce the sort of nuance that preserves an initial propaganda line while making money off that demand. but when there's one of those TV shows pushing similar propaganda, there's usually not a lot of the audience out there demanding a spin-off putting the audience in the shoes of the villains. whether it turns into a product or not, the POV of video game consumers toward the story-defined villains seems to be different.

cars posted:

one part that makes me wonder about it is how video game players have a tendency to fetishize the bad guys in their favorite games & want to buy expansions that allow them to play as the bad guys and learn all about their sympathetic motivations and so on, because when they see a toy they can't play with inside the game they get frustrated.

Yeah dunno. At least with these serious basement war nerd games I'm talking about, I think some of it is that these games focus in on lower layers of warfare, which is abstracted to a degree from politics or strategy i.e. what the hell you're doing fighting a war (hard to explain). It's not, really, but it appears as such in the game world. An "apolitical" attitude still carries its own ideology, though. And at least with World War II games, I think they often reflect the Lost Cause-style myth that developed after World War II that both tried to depoliticize the German army and present its officers as tactical virtuosos who lost because they were swamped by the Red Hordes, in part for self-serving reasons by German authors of memoirs who fought in the war and survived, and for anti-communist prerogatives. Some of these books were outright fabricated like Guy Sajer's "Forgotten Soldier" which came out in the early '70s and received praise in the NYT, presenting the Wehrmacht as not being influenced by Nazi ideology and "just defending Europe from the Bolsheviks!" Oh, well that's an improvement...

On the plus side, I think those myths have come under pressure in the past 20 years or so. David Glantz has written a lot that is as good a look at the Soviet military in the war as you're going to find in English. The "Clean Wehrmacht" myth has been harder to sustain. That might have pushed back against some of the worst impulses of the hardcore war nerds, since they will listen to someone like Glantz, and there is Radio War Nerd... and I mention that because John Dolan was one of those guys until he turned into... well, John Dolan. But it's still a jingo genre. And some of these games can be just blood curdling:

It is the near future. One of the last bastions of true Communism, the corrupt and bankrupt police state of North Korea, has been involved in the dirty business of trading uranium. Trading it for what, though? Food to feed their starving people? Medical supplies for the thousands dying each day from disease and malnutrition? No, the ruling monsters have been trading it for more weaponry, in the hope of one day seeing their nightmare vision of uniting the two Koreas under the red banner come to fruition.

Early morning, 11 September 2010, the DMZ erupts in a symphony of death and destruction. Has the blitzkrieg began? It has, but the tanks and helicopters cutting a swath across no man's land aren't heading south - they're going north. The US-ROK invasion has just begun, and soon the Axis of Evil club will lose yet another member. You are there.

While the cowardly leftists wail and gnash their teeth, fight for truth, democracy, and world freedom in Raging Tiger: The Second Korean War, taking the battle to another tinpot dictator that would be better off six feet under. Command an arsenal of next generation weapons and the brave warriors that use them as you fight on land, air, and sea. From heavy equipment carriers like HEMMTs to Harrier jump jets to the grunt on the field, Raging Tiger provides players with plenty of nifty toys to wage war with.

Flying_horse_in_saudi_arabia posted:

Not to reignite the conversation earlier about low standards for video game writing, but this whole experience and my understanding of the cult around Swery does tend to expose how much Game's is crying out for its own Lynch, a real mad genius auter type who can sneak original art in a mass entertainment vehicle. Game's doesn't need to fulfill that criterion to be worthwhile, but it'd be nice, wouldn't it?

D4 was never finished but the title credits still get stuck in my mind all the time